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Film critic David Edelstein provides his list of the ten best motion-picture directors and genres, a selection guaranteed to delight, disappoint, amuse, or enrage movie buffs. But quarrel with him or not, Edelstein never fails to provide some engaging arguments for his selections.
By David Edelstein
Compiling a list of best movies is a slippery slope. There are simply too many candidates from too many eras from too many countries. And there aren’t any objective criteria for determining which films are great and which aren’t. But it’s fun to cite the directors (and, in some cases, genres) that have meant the most to me and to many other movie lovers.
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I put together a top-ten list for directors (and genres) and never got to screwball comedy; film noir; Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly musicals; Italian neorealism, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and the French new wave; or the Asian masters (Ozu, Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa). But here’s a starting list.
Yes, he deserves his racist bogeyman reputation for The Birth of a Nation (1915), which ends with a “heroic” rescue by the Ku Klux Klan. But just as Leni Riefenstahl was a great artist despite the Nazi propaganda of her Triumph of the Will (1935), Griffith must be recognized as one of the most brilliant film artists ever. It isn’t simply that he invented the close-up shot; he helped conceive the very syntax of storytelling on screen. His greatest work, Intolerance (1916), purports to document the history of that subject from biblical times to the beginning of the 20th century. In its breadth and daring—in the ways it crosscuts among different eras—it’s both ludicrous and wildly exciting and a rebuke to the small-scale ambitions of modern cinema.
The most famous of the comic actor-directors of the silent era is Charlie Chaplin, but some of us prefer the less sentimental, more thrillingly acrobatic films of Buster Keaton, especially Our Hospitality (1923), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1927), and The General (1927). The essayist Gilberto Perez sums up the philosophy behind Keaton’s stunts (which he performed himself), “to engage a mechanical universe by the strategic use of his body as a piece of the machinery.” And while that body was pulled hither and yon, his face—with those heavy, dolorous lids—remained poetically (and hilariously) impassive.
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It’s tempting to call him the greatest humanist filmmaker of all time, but that word conjures up warm and fuzzy things. Renoir at his greatest was the opposite of fuzzy: He saw human nature at both its most callous and its most generous. His films are intricately staged—he was a man of theater. Yet, the framing seems open, almost casual: The canvas breathes. French masterpieces such as A Day in the Country (1936), Grand Illusion (1936), The Lower Depths (1937), and The Rules of the Game (1939) represent the summit of his work. Even after Renoir left France he had masterpieces in him—among them The River (1951), in which he collaborated with the great Indian director of the Apu trilogy, Satyajit Ray.
He created the vocabulary for the modern thriller and made it possible for the audience to take more pleasure in the mechanics of suspense than in the arbitrary objective he termed the MacGuffin. I wouldn’t limit myself to a single Hitchcock film, but Notorious (1946) has everything you could want in a romantic suspense picture without a drop of blood. Many critics swoon over the brooding, subtext-laden Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958), but I prefer the trickster Hitchcock of The 39 Steps (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Strangers on a Train (1951), and North By Northwest (1959). Hitchcock’s legacy isn’t all positive: In his hateful masterpiece Psycho (1960), he fathered one strain of the modern horror movie —the hack-’em-up—arguably debased by later filmmakers.
He wrote and directed three of the greatest comedies of all time—The Lady Eve (1941), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), and Unfaithfully Yours (1948). But who would want to be without The Great McGinty (1940), Christmas in July (1940), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), or The Palm Beach Story (1942)? A ladies’ man and bon vivant who oscillated wildly between riches and bankruptcy, Sturges drew a fluid line from the hobos to the hoity-toity. His dialogue was clever without being arch, his witticisms among the most soulful written by an American.
We love him not just because he made the flamboyantly audacious Citizen Kane (1941) but because he was one of those sacred monsters whose self-destructive impulses were inextricably woven into his genius. Almost every movie he made after Citizen Kane is compromised. But what a collection: the overflowing The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); the brusque, rococo Touch of Evil (1958, restored in 1998); an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1948), which Welles described as a “violently sketched charcoal drawing of a great play”; another adaptation, Othello (1952), and the slapdash but overwhelming Falstaff (1966, also known as Chimes at Midnight). Welles doesn’t disappear the way Jean Renoir does: His exhibitionistic personality is in every frame.
The greatest living American director had few big moneymakers after his first hit, M*A*S*H (1970), but his legacy remains indelible: big, ensemble casts that improvise freely; overlapping dialogue of actors speaking simultaneously; and a caustic insight into the cant of modern culture. No one but Altman could have brought off that paranoid panorama Nashville (1975) or infused the reactionary old Western in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) with such counterculture soul. He has made a lot of bad movies, but the best—among them The Long Goodbye (1973), Thieves Like Us (1974), California Split (1974), and The Player (1992)—will still be debated and relished 100 years from now.
The myth of the American West comprises many self-serving lies and some thrilling truths, on a broad canvas that captured the imagination of the world. John Ford’s films defined the most magnificent and most pernicious of the genre—nobility and racism in Stagecoach (1939), Fort Apache (1948), and The Searchers (1956). The simplistic Shane (1953) hasn’t worn well, but check the works of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962), which continue to fascinate. The 1960s and 1970s saw brilliant revisionist oaters such as Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Altman’s poetic McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). Across the Atlantic, Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone’s so-called spaghetti Westerns were capitalist parables on an even grander (and bloodier) scale.
Movies can take the vague terrors that live in the basements of our psyches and make them flesh. Even now, my diet includes white-knuckle spook shows such as F. W. Murnau’s silent Nosferatu (1922), James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943). The modern era brought us England’s marvelous Hammer horrors (from Hammer Film Productions), including Dracula and Frankenstein films with their Gothic trappings, fangs, and cleavage. It also gave us the luxuriantly bloody giallos of the Italians Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964) and Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975). Giallo (Italian for “yellow”) was the cover color of paperback pulp thrillers in Italy after World War II. George R. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Martin (1977) are unsurpassed in their treatment of social and sexual anxieties, and in The Brood (1979) and The Fly (1986), David Cronenberg showed how far a visionary artist could take us into the realm of “body horror.”
In the United States, government censorship was no more, taboos were being flouted, political unrest had penetrated every part of the culture, and movies were never more exhilarating. Films risked more, they looked and sounded different, and they changed our consciousness. This was the era that gave us the best of Robert Altman; Francis Ford Coppola, whose Godfather saga remains one of the great American works of popular art; Martin Scorsese, whose Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976, with Paul Schrader) gave a new, expressionistic form to the rhythms of urban life; and Steven Spielberg, who proved that even a kid educated largely at the movies could tell us something about the way we live. Unfortunately, Spielberg’s stupendous Jaws (1975), along with George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977), helped to usher in the blockbuster mentality that threatened to wipe out serious filmmaking in Hollywood. But from the dark 1980s came the independent cinema movement, and all was not lost.
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